Abstract

Legal biligualism highlights the meta-linguistic nature of law: norms exist in the world of ideas, and not only in their textual representation, and are only partially rendered by different linguistic efforts to express them. If law lies between different linguistic versions, does it also reside in the space between legal traditions? Bijuralism (that is, the simultaneous expression of a norm in two legal traditions) can lead to a form of dialog between traditions, beyond the juxtaposition of loosely equivalent versions of the same norm. This dialogical bijuralism rests on the possibility of a plural legal identity and culture for a single person. It also leads to a more radical hypothesis: that of a meta-traditional normativity, that is, of a set of legal ideas which exist outside of their particular manifestations in a given legal tradition.